Pseudo-history, and related issues

[D B Campbell]

Philosophy and logic are not common subjects when historians are educated; in Germany and the Netherlands, theory is part of the curriculum, but I am not sure that it is common in the Anglo-Saxon world.

One year of philosophy used to be mandatory in Scottish universities; its abandonment in the 1990s is just another symptom of the sad decline in Scottish education.

A partial explanation is that ancient historians used to be educated as classicists (e.g., Cartledge), so they can explain everything about the exact meaning of an with an optative in a clause, and have not sufficient time for the theoretical foundations of their discipline.

But classicists should have at least a passing familiarity with (ancient) philosophy.

I am always bemused by the fact that ancient history is a subject that many feel they can turn their hand to, without having had any instruction whatsoever. We don't seem to see the same thing happening in other disciplines. I can't suddenly decide to be a barrister, for example, and pitch up at the law courts one morning. Usually, we have to demonstrate our expertise in some way -- I guess the fact that one of your examples is a Cambridge professor may undermine my argument a little, Jona! -- but publishers seem to fall over themselves to publish anything and everything. I recently had the misfortune to review a book entitled Cartimandua, and I have absolutely no idea how it ever got across an editor's desk -- if it had been submitted as an undergraduate dissertation, it would have been shredded.

Perhaps the main offenders are writers who have not studied their source material diligently, and/or are unaware of the limitations of their source material, and/or are willfully ignorant of the range of relevant source material. The words "sloppy" and "ignorant" inevitably spring to mind, but you can't use these in your book, Jona!